Love and hate can so easily get out of hand. But our loving and hating of those who are (in our understanding) mute, like the sick dog in Valencia, like M Derrida’s staring cat, is all the more potent for their lack of conversation. We are so very constituted by our language that when we come up against an absence of it as we know it, we supply the missing words, or at any rate interpret the silence as if it contained words. If we can’t fill up the silence to our satisfaction, we take it as an indication of either extreme helplessness or extreme malevolence. The love and the hate we feel for animals is surely born out of their uncanny silence – for all that it may be our own surplus chattering which is the anomaly in the world.
We were all, once, wordless ourselves. That must be important when we encounter silence in the Other. We were, as a result, much loved and hated by the chatterers who stood over our cradles and coaxed us eventually into language. Even once we have start to talk, it takes many years before we let go of our infantile affinity with the mute, if we ever really do. Small children have secret alliances with all kinds of inanimate and conversationless entities. I talked to dolls and soft toys, confided in books, coloured bricks – even small pieces of fabric had the substance of personhood and the possibility of relationship to me. I had an invisible friend, not like some invisible friends, another child; mine was called ‘God’. He was powerful but not omniscient. At any rate, one had to drawn his attention to things. I told him stories of what was happening and asked for practical, worldly assistance in return for certain repetitive behaviours (saying ‘Please’ a hundred times before going to sleep, or tying my shoelaces correctly three times in a row in the morning) which for some unfathomable reason gave him satisfaction. He never spoke to me. The ways of my God, my dolls and my coloured bricks, were mysterious, but they all understood language. They were not substitutes for real people, for friends, they were different and essential, because only they could be told what I dared tell no one else, and only they knew the real me and my life. Even if they never spoke to me, they understood what I said. It didn’t cross my mind, as I try now to remember, that other children had their own private confidential intimates. I never discussed it with them, it didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. A million individual other privacies didn’t impinge on mine.
On the other hand, I knew, without having to think about it too much, that I wasn’t alone in my confidences to the other world. I read books (as well as talked to them). The A. A. Milne stories were immensely reassuring from a very early age. Christopher Robin’s whole life as it came to me from the books was involved with the soft animal toys that lived on the end of his bed. They were far more puzzled by the world than my confidants, but they had language and interacted with Christopher Robin. Most books for young children contained inanimate or languageless entities that lived and spoke and sometimes interacted with their child owners. Children talking to each other was rather rare in those earliest books. Most of all, for me, there was Alice, who talked to anything and everything, and was never surprised for long at the otherness of the world. Alice made and makes complete sense to me. Even the enclosing narratives, before she entered Wonderland or the Looking-glass World, confirmed what I knew.
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’
Or of a book with which you couldn’t have a conversation?
Alice had a silent Other, one (not having a pet myself) that seemed to me even more satisfactory than a doll or God.
‘Kitty, can you play chess? Now, don’t smile, my dear, I’m asking it seriously. Because when we were playing just now, you watched just as if you understood it: and when I said “Check!” you purred! … Kitty, dear, let’s pretend … Now, if only you’ll attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House.’
And then, after melting through the glass and having her strangely ordinary, or ordinarily strange adventures, Alice returned to the regular drawing room on the other side of the mirror, and to the kitten she was still holding in her lap.
It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr. ‘If they would only purr for “yes” and mew for “no”, or any rule of that sort,’ she had said, ‘so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?’
Saying the same thing is the same as saying nothing. Derrida points out, while having communication problems of his own with a pussycat, that the way cats communicate in the Alice books is the very essence of uncanny silence. The Cheshire Cat does speak, although of alarming things: ‘We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ He comes and goes repeatedly up on the branch of his tree before he makes a final disappearance, leaving behind nothing more than a grin. ‘I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice, ‘But a grin without a cat!’ (What is the use of a cat without words and pictures?) The Cheshire Cat is somewhat terrifying, while Kitty is exasperating but lovable. Neither of them is willing or able to give satisfactory or reassuring accounts of themselves or the world. Alice is not just waking up, but growing up. The lack of conversation in the Other must be confronted. Animals are not us. Animals are not-us. But the dream world hasn’t quite departed, and it doesn’t ever go entirely away. If living in a dream is being mad, then being mad is living in a dream where everything and anything that is not you might be your closest friend or deadliest foe.
The sensation feels like bugs, worms, or mites that are biting, crawling over or burrowing into, under, or out of your skin. They must be there, because you can feel them and you are even pretty sure that you can see them. You may also believe that your home or furniture is infested, but you may be the only one who knows they are there. No one seems to think they exist except you. Nothing seems to get rid of them. So what are they?
University of California/Statewide Integrated Pest
Management Program/How to Manage Pests/Pests
of Homes, Structures, People and Pets
During my late teens, I discovered another kind of animal in my life in addition to all the lovable cuddly toys, the nursery domestic animals in books and cartoons and various real animals of my childhood. These didn’t fit into any category of creature I’d previously known. They were, for sure, ‘insects’, but though I hazarded the odd guess, I couldn’t say precisely which particular insects they were. I knew them by another categorical description: parasites. Funguses can be parasites, but what most immediately comes to mind when I think of parasites are insects and crawling. The two go together. The other thing I knew about them was that they were my parasites. They lived on and possibly in me. I hosted them. Unwillingly. There was, apart from their very insistence on inhabiting me, no communication between us.
It started just after I left school, and continued during (although it was not the reason for) my period in various psychiatric hospitals and later, in the mid and late sixties. The diagnosis by the hospitals was specifically ‘depression’ and more generally ‘borderline personality disorder’. (This latter was at the time a common diagnosis, particularly of difficult young women. It has, I think, changed in the way it is used, although it still seems to be broader than it is explanatory.) I had some reason for my secret anxiety, initially. A boyfriend told me that he had pubic crabs and gave me a little pot of ointment from the chemist to deal with any he had donated to me. I never actually saw any on myself, although I looked carefully and often, and used the pot of ointment until it was empty. This was a year or two before my first hospitalisation in that period. I never really felt sure that I had got rid of the crabs – not, as I say, that I’d seen any in the first place, and I’d been assured they were easily visible to the human eye. I was horrified at the idea of crabs. Living things crawling on me, and so close to inside me. Of course, I was also upset that my boyfriend, much older than me, had them in the first place, presumably from sleeping around. An emotionally complicated situation, further complicated by my general decline into depression months later, my father dying suddenly, quitting school just before my A-level exams and then leaving my foster-mother’s house for a bed-sitting room on my own. Enough to get me hospitalised without anyone knowing about my private alarm.
From then on for two years or more, in hospital and out, I was convinced that I was infested. ‘Infested’ was the word I thought, as well as ‘contaminated’. The pubic lice multiplied to a plethora and became imaginatively licenced to inhabit my entire body. They crawled on my arms, my torso, my legs, my hair, sometimes my face and neck. They had become all-rounder lice. Not even lice, if someone had pointed out the impossible ethology I had invented for them. They were … I didn’t know what they were, but they were. Insects, lice-like, flea-like, tic-like crawling creatures that lived on me, and indeed, in me. I thought they burrowed under my skin and emerged to wander about on the surface in the dark of night or under cover of my clothes. I felt them, itching in specific parts, arms, legs, head, everywhere, and the redness I saw when I finished scratching my skin convinced me that they were there (so easy now to write that rational sentence). I saw them, always out of the corner of my eye. I became most distressed at night. I would feel their presence and then turn on the light quickly to catch them, but of course, they had burrowed back into my skin by the time I could focus. It was a game of malevolent hide-and-seek. They had super-lice powers: they sensed me looking for them, and always dodged me. I turned on the lights often during each night. I was sure I saw them, yet I could never quite say what they looked like. I found evidence of them, even occasionally caught one and killed it as you do a flea, squeezing it between my fingers. Then I would put it in my palm and examine it carefully under a light. I saw it was something, a mote, a dot, black, white, grey, but never quite well enough to be sure exactly what. It could have been a flake of skin, a speck of dust, a tiny thread, but I knew it wasn’t. In that special way you know when you really know, or are crazy.
It was a continuing hell. The horror of it lurked in my mind, on my body, in the back of my mind always, even when I wasn’t frantically searching, and it went on for two or three years. And I kept silent about it. When I was living on my own, I repeatedly washed my bedding and clothes at the hottest possible temperature at the launderette, but it was never enough. Eventually, I put all my bedding and my clothes, except for one outfit, into a plastic bag and threw them away. I couldn’t explain to people why I was wearing the same clothes all the time, or to myself what to do about the obvious fact that this last outfit must also be contaminated. But for all that, I functioned, as it were, normally. I didn’t discuss my obsession with anyone who was available to help me, doctors or friends. I kept it to myself, making it impossible for anyone to know and therefore do anything to assist me. The reason was that I was ashamed to be contaminated. I thought I must be the only person in the world, that this was the worst anyone could imagine (I could imagine) about another person, and that people would be disgusted and shun me. At the same time I kept my distance from people. I was contagious. If people came close to me they risked becoming infested too. With that, I was at the same time both immensely powerful and completely powerless. There was another reason I didn’t speak about it: I sort of knew it was crazy, and that what I was convinced of was impossible, while nevertheless being sure that I was indeed infested. So I also didn’t mention it because it was so mad.
Just once I told someone about it. When I was in the first hospital, in St Pancras, I was getting exhausted with my searching of myself, it became unbearable, and I said to a nurse who I liked that I thought I was infested. I suppose she told the doctor. I imagine now that she understood that I wasn’t actually covered with crawling insects, but it was arranged to my relief that I go to the infestation clinic, which happened to be next door to the hospital (an awful confirmatory coincidence, it seemed to me at the time). I was escorted there and put into a disinfectant bath, went through the process of having my hair combed for nits and coating my body with whatever the lotion was that was used to get rid of body and pubic lice. They checked me all over, and said I was OK. I was content for about twenty-four hours before I knew it hadn’t worked. I told the nurse, who explained that the treatment was infallible. So I didn’t mention it again. But I bought stuff from chemists’ and regularly anointed myself with the chemical insecticide and dosed my head with lice lotion. Very gradually, without my really noticing, I seemed to grow out of it, as children do those indefinable stomach pains they have. Every now and then I’d have a panic and go to the chemist, but those episodes became more spaced out and, eventually, I realised that the terror had gone away, even if somewhere in me there remains a small dark area that twitches anxiously from time to time.
No one used the phrase ‘delusional parasitosis’. Actually, I only discovered that it was a condition with a name when I was researching and reading for this book on animals. I knew I’d been crazy during that period, but I didn’t know I’d been crazy with a condition that had a name, and that although it wasn’t common, was well known in psychiatric literature. Not just psychiatric literature. Delusional parasitosis is where psychiatry meets academic entomology and pest control.
Varmint Guard in Columbus, Ohio, offers ‘complete residential pest control services and our regular treatment programs are designed to keep your homes pest free. Insects, rodents, bats and all nuisance wildlife problems are effectively addressed’. It has an excellent website with a Pest Library that offers a chance to identify Pests of the Season and it also has a separate three-page essay describing delusional parasitosis. It gives full details of the symptoms and explains that Varmint Guard operatives are trained to examine a house thoroughly, leaving sticky traps and investigating the areas the customer is suspicious of. Then:
If no candidate arthropods are found on the sticky monitors, upon examination, then the Varmint Guard staff entomologist will call or visit the customer, tactfully discuss the findings from the monitors, and compassionately express caution that an indoor treatment of the residence or workplace with insecticide is not the solution and is not recommended for safety and legal considerations. Rather, the solution may very well lie with consulting a healthcare professional or industrial/home environment hygienist. In most instances, the delusory sensations will not subside unless the sufferer is treated with certain antipsychotic drugs, which must be prescribed by an attending psychiatrist.
The difficulty in helping victims of delusory parasitosis towards a lasting solution to their problem lies in the legal risks associated with suggesting an appointment with a qualified (DP-experienced) psychiatrist. A family physician is best-qualified to recommend this course of action to victims or involved family members. Unfortunately, most physicians who become involved in such cases lend credibility to their delusory patient’s reports of bites and burrowing sensations and mistakenly recommend pest management as the answer.
A website called What’s That Bug? carries a letter from the operations manager of a pest management firm:
Dear Bugman,
I’m nearly at my wits-end. I work for a pest control company and I’ve had a gentleman calling me trying to verbally describe a bug that is ‘burrowing’ into his (and his wife’s) skin. He’s been to several Doctors, Dermatologists, and Emergency Rooms – nobody can identify the problem.
Several responses suggest that delusional parasitosis might be the answer, and finally one from Nancy C. Hinkle of the Department of Entomology at the University of Georgia suggests referring the clients there, where a study is being made of the subject. It’s not uncommon for sufferers to go to entomologists on their own. The second (even the first) port of call for someone plagued by imaginary insects is to an expert who will provide a practical solution. There is among entomologists an instant diagnosis known as ‘the matchbox sign’. The client will bring out a matchbox (or container) for the entomologist, containing what they insist is the problem bug which they have brought for identification. The bug expert sees a speck of skin, a hair with a follicle attached, or dandruff, and knows great tact is called for. Hinkle has written a detailed paper in the American Entomologist describing the condition of delusional parasitosis and her experiences with clients who came to her for help. It is distracting for someone whose work is to study cattle infestation to have to deal with psychiatric patients, but she is not alone. Nor is she lacking in understanding. There is something about insects, as we all know, and most kinds of madness have echoes in the ‘normal’ world. Those with delusional parasitosis often spread the delusion to those close to them, so that family members believe they can see the creatures too. Hinkle isn’t surprised:
Entomologists who deal with delusory parasitosis cases will attest to this. Despite finding no arthropod in any samples provided, there is a strong urge to take a shower following these examinations. Consciously, one realises that there is no infestation, but subconsciously one often feels the ‘creepy-crawlies’ after looking through the victim’s scurf. In fact, the author, while reading through the delusory parasitosis literature in preparing this article, found herself absentmindedly scratching; before the manuscript was completed, her arms and legs bore distinct scarification.
People can be deluded about all manner of things, but the belief that insects have invaded the body and cannot be seen or effectively dealt with suggests a particular horror of something other – a living, deliberate other – far too close to our known selves. Think of The Fly. In my recollection, there was a terrible secret I had, and it was shared only by the creatures that had come to inhabit me. In some decidedly unpleasant way, the insects and I colluded in a truth that other people couldn’t be party to or understand. The creatures had chosen me, were closer to me than any person I knew. They and I were an us. They say that there is never more than six feet between you and the nearest rat, even though they remain invisible for most of the time. Derrida was anxious about his cat looking from a bathroom’s distance at his naked body. I was host to a multitude of animate creatures who had come very much closer. Animals trouble us at any distance.
And then there’s too much loving, if that’s the right word. It is and it isn’t. But that’s always at least potentially true of the word ‘love’, in whatever context it crops up. The ambiguity of love is as manifest in what people feel for animals as it is in what people feel for people. Consider the Cat Lady. Most areas have one. Most areas (villages, we used to call them) have always had one. The Cat Lady has made a small but significant journey over the past three or four hundred years. She began as the local wise, if odd, woman, by definition on the fringes of society, with her companion cats, to whom you went if you needed a spell or a cure. She had a hard time when the Church and society began to persecute her, and, finally overwhelmed and often killed on account of her role as an outsider, she lost her status as a common resource. The useful, weird woman with a cat became the dangerous, satanic witch with her feline familiar. Gradually, she emerged as the (usually) kind-hearted if sometimes a little scary, solitary elderly lady who lives down the bottom of the road, and provides a social service for stray or unwanted cats and their reluctant owners in the area.
The contemporary Cat Lady might be quite benign: a member of the Cats Protection League, supported by the organisation, taking in strays and fostering them until they can be re-homed. She (or sometimes he) might, on the other hand, be a freelance cat lover whose own unmet inner needs cause his or her feline philanthropy to get wildly out of hand: someone with a mental illness who needs cats (or sometimes dogs) and whose life becomes overwhelmed by them. Our way in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries requires a redescription of the folk history as pathology. ‘Animal hoarder’ is not just a definition of what these people do, it is now a diagnosis. It’s worth wondering if the naming of this newly described mental disorder isn’t a contemporary version of the earlier designation of difficult and inconvenient old ladies, by society and the Church, as witches or heretics. Who knows whether we understand so much more now that we can identify and name a condition for a behaviour that has always existed (they’re not wyse women or witches, they’re pathological cat hoarders), or if we create named syndromes because it’s our ‘scientific’ version of controlling those who won’t live within civilised bounds of decency, and a way of reshaping our visceral disgust and fear into medicalised concern? An abstract of a paper in the Clinical Psychology Review defines the problem:
Animal hoarding is a poorly understood, maladaptive, destructive behavior whose etiology and pathology are only beginning to emerge. We compare and contrast animal hoarding to the compulsive hoarding of objects and proceed to draw upon attachment theory, the literature of personality disorder and trauma, and our own clinical experience to propose a developmental trajectory. Throughout life, there is a persistent struggle to form a functional attachment style and achieve positive social integration. For some people, particularly those affected by a dysfunctional primary attachment experience in childhood, a protective, comforting relationship with animals may form an indelible imprint. In adulthood, when human attachment has been chronically problematic, compulsive caregiving of animals can become the primary means of maintaining or building a sense of self. Improving assessment and treatment of animal hoarders requires attention to contributing psychosocial conditions, while taking into account the centrality of the animals to the hoarder’s identity, self-esteem and sense of control. It is our hope that the information presented will provide a basis upon which clinicians can focus their own counseling style, assessment, and methods of treatment.1
This sounds suspiciously like teaching old witches to suck eggs. Surely, it’s not very poorly understood, except by those writing of a new psychiatric disorder. Instead of a Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer for Witches written for Inquisitors in 1486), we have a diagnosis and management plan for them. Sometimes we do little more than alter the language with which we isolate the difficult. Still, we don’t strangle and burn them, we just sanitise and medicate them. Old people (often, but not always women, and there were male witches too) may be lonely, and some of them might have had unhappy emotional lives. Animals become vitally important to them as a way of getting affection, being in control, having something of their own. Animal hoarding is slipped into the taxonomy of madness as a subset of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). It doesn’t get us very far in preventing the situations from getting so out of hand, but it does isolate the problem around the sufferer and thereby deal with what is especially inexplicable and distressing to many people about animal hoarding. Hoarding may be a sign of a general symptom, but people who hoard newspapers, though they might live in impossible, dangerous and unhygienic conditions, don’t get quite such a bad write-up. They don’t get arrested and charged, and only rarely are their houses condemned. But animal hoarders force us (with the escaping smell and the sight of too many living things in the same place) to confront our own intensely complex attitudes to nonhuman animals.
In October 2009, in Sacramento, Kathy and Paul Franco, an elderly couple, were arrested and their house condemned as unfit for human habitation. The police had been called because of the smell, and they found seventy-seven cats in the house which was almost ankle-deep in faeces. They were charged with animal cruelty.
In Boston in 2003, Heidi Erickson’s apartment was raided. Five malnourished cats and a Great Dane were discovered, as well as sixty dead cats, most of them, though not all, frozen. She was banned from keeping cats in the city of Boston, but a month later a second apartment belonging to her was discovered in a nearby town, which contained fifty-two sick cats and a dozen dead bodies. ‘They’re my family,’ Erickson told the police. She described herself as ‘bereft’ of her ‘babies’. In the Boston Phoenix, Clea Simon explains:
In a 1999 study, it found about 2000 cases of hoarding nationally each year. While not all cases are as extreme as Erickson’s, most hoarders (76 per cent) are female and more than half live alone, as Erickson does. At 42, she’s younger than the 46 per cent of hoarders who are 60 or over. But her actions do match the 80 per cent of cases in which dead or sick animals are found, and the 60 per cent in which the hoarder does not acknowledge a problem.
It starts out well enough, with one or two cats, and then escalates out of control. Local inconvenient cats are brought to the old person, known for their fondness for animals, they breed, strays wander in for the food and their numbers grow. Reality slips away, the cats get sick, or cost much more to feed than their rescuer’s income. The hoarders neglect themselves as well as the cats, because they can’t cope with the ever-increasing size of the problem, and they deal with their overwhelming difficulties, as many of us do, by denying that anything is wrong.
A study of the problem found
Dead or sick animals were discovered in 80 per cent of reported cases, yet in nearly 60 per cent of cases the hoarder would not acknowledge the problem (Patronek, 1999). In 69 per cent of cases, animal faeces and urine accumulated in living areas, and over one-quarter of the hoarders’ beds were soiled with faeces or urine. Hoarders’ justifications for their behavior included an intense love of animals, the feeling that animals were surrogate children, the belief that no one else would or could take care of them, and the fear that the animals would be euthanized … a significant number of hoarders had nonfunctional utilities (i.e., bathroom plumbing, cooking facilities, heat, refrigeration and electricity).2
It becomes catastrophic and the evidence seeps out into the world. When newspapers get hold of it and publish descriptions and pictures it’s easy to be appalled at the suffering to the animals, but there’s also something else: disgust. It is partly to do with dirt, of which there is plenty, but there is also a kind of panic, and I feel it rising in myself, at the idea of too many non-human creatures living in a human habitation. We use the words ‘seethe’ and ‘swarm’ to describe alien things that are too many and make us feel queasy and overwhelmed as a result. Insects (like my illusory parasites and the real things), snakes in a pit, and rats seethe and swarm; and cats, too, when they are in a small, contained human space seethe and swarm, and disturb us deep down by their unmanageable numbers, even if we are cat lovers and can explain away our distress at animal hoarding as a result of our affection for the animals who are suffering. One cat and an attractive woman (Cat and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) is eloquent and appealing. Seventy cats and an old lady who can’t keep up with the cleaning, feeding and sickness, is an infestation: repellent, and deeply, mysteriously disturbing. Animals in a human context are fine when we are in control of them and when they are healthy, amusing and obedient companions. We love them and love ourselves loving them. But if they won’t be loved, or get well or obey, like the baby bird I found and brought home, and instead go dying hopelessly, ungratefully and horribly behind radiators, or they get sick and mangy, or multiply exponentially and shit all over the floor, creating filth and an intolerable stink, we hate them, really loathe them, and we want them away from our sight, as I did the baby bird, not to have to think about how everything can go so wrong so easily in an apparently ordered world without anyone intending it. And we are especially horror-struck by those who cause this to happen by needing so much that they don’t notice the awfulness of too much. The needing is monstrous and fearful. And perhaps we are disturbed, too, by the way the animals, no matter what their condition, stay, colluding with, even loving, it would seem, their crazy unlovable carer. Too much love, or something that has nothing to do with love at all, but desperate need and a capacity to live with the intolerable on both sides – animals show us all that too.
However, prior to the pathological or the uncanny, there’s a milder state of animal obsession that moves or amuses us. It’s a very fine balancing point, but with reassurance (railings, say, or official approval) the distress at too many living creatures, at seething cats, swarming felines, can be suppressed. On my first visit to Rome a few years ago, I stayed in a hotel near the square of sunken excavation at Torre Argentina. I wandered across the road from my hotel to look down into the ruins; taking an easy minimal tourist moment. It is one of the oldest temples in Rome, built around 400–300 BC, the place where Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar in 44 BC and it’s a perfect, neatly contained image of Roman ruins: you look down from the pavement at fragments of walls, stone columns of varying heights, upright and toppled, pathways interrupted by broken, scattered slabs of stone, worn steps leading to an altar. Most ruins are empty places, filled only by passing, wandering tourists, coming and going along defined routes, but Torre Argentina, though walled off from the city above it, is an inhabited ruin. All the paths, columns and slabs and creeping foliage are furniture, walkways, resting places in shade or sun, dining facilities and meeting areas for the hundreds of stray cats who live down there in their subterranean, antique feline city. After the excavation was completed in 1929, some feral and stray cats moved in to hang out in this safe, out-of-the-way place, and soon the gattari (the Italian for Cat Ladies) arrived to take care of them – one of them the almost mythic actress Anna Magnani, who was working at the teatro nearby.
I spent a contented hour or more every day while I was in Rome leaning on the railings, looking down at Cat Central. Safe and untroubled, they lead what appear to be purposeful, self-regulated lives among the ancient ruins. They loll in the sun, rest in the shade, sniff and scratch around in the greenery growing up and around the ancient stones; others idly stroll the paths or run swiftly along the tops of walls, leaping over gaps left by history to the next broken segment. They perch on fractured columns, watching those walking below them and sometimes pounce. They meet up, sniffing each other briefly and pass by unconcerned, or arch their backs and challenge each other with deadly stares or unearthly yowls. There are groups which are perfectly comfortable together in their own particular area, others are individuals exploring and testing alien territory, who belong in different parts of the ruins with their own comrades, while some of the cats look as if they only ever walk alone, as cats are supposed to do. But all of them choose to be there, as Bunty chooses to live in my house, and as Darcy eventually chose (or his cat-Alzheimer’s chose) not to. It is their home. And it looks, from their untroubled existence down there, that they know it. As all cats do, they own it by being there.
It is safer down in the ruins than up on the streets dodging forests of legs, cars and motor scooters, but they are also there because of the saucers that are dotted around the landscape. There has been a continuous stream of gattari since 1929. Some are Italian, but there have also been ex-patriot English and German women who have taken it on themselves to care for the cats. They used their own money to feed them and set up Torre Argentina as a sanctuary. People now bring their unwanted cats, or cats they have found ailing, troubled or troubling in the streets, to the small office the gattari have made down the stairs under the pavement. Several thousand cats a year pass through, and they are inspected, nursed, fed and, if possible, sent on to a foster-home. Two women, Silvia and Lia, have been in charge since 1994, having taken over from a solitary woman who was feeding and caring for the cats without any kind of assistance. ‘This woman’s generous efforts put her on the verge of economical and emotional collapse,’ writes Silvia on the Torre Argentina website. Now, teams of volunteers help to keep the cats fed, clean and overseen. Vets offer their services as charity. Almost all of the cats living in the sanctuary have feline leukaemia, but they are given treatment and taken into the office, which doubles as a hospital, to be cared for when they need it. There are around 250 cats permanently at Torre Argentina, as well as the cats people bring along, all of which are spayed and neutered before they are released into the ruins. The ones that don’t find foster-homes stay in Torre Argentina and some are ‘adopted at a distance’ as a means of providing income for the sanctuary. Nevertheless, Silvia and Lia are still squatters in their underground office, which remains unconnected to the city sewers. They display devotion and offer Rome a service (though one that is apparently unappreciated by the city council), and no one suggests that they suffer from the pathology of cat hoarding. The differences are structural – the cats they care for are outside rather than in their own homes; they have created an organisation that helps to fund and find volunteers and medics, who offer their services to deal humanely with the animals and their needs. There is no denial. It doesn’t seem to threaten to get out of hand, and, of course, for the onlooker, it is a sunken separated site with substantial containing walls and railings. This alleviates any anxiety of excess. Idiotic, of course, because the cats easily slip through the railings when they want, and the gattari and even the public can open the gate and descend into the ruins. But it remains a contained spectacle. There is no need to do more than stand, as many do, and as I did, looking down at the lives of the animals, spectating, almost believing they are creatures in the wild, cats as we rarely see them, leading their own uninterrupted lives, as it seems, and to feel grateful to the women who are prepared to take responsibility for them. Nothing too frightening there, and much to be grateful for.
In America, Craig Grant also seems to have managed to sidestep the diagnosis of animal hoarding. His story reads remarkably like the pathology, but stays just this side of alarming for the observer. He was retired and his son left home, not taking his cat with him, or perhaps deliberately leaving him for his father who would otherwise have been alone. Grant objected; he didn’t like the cat much, but gradually he and the cat saw eye to eye, and people brought one or two more cats. When he had seven, his landlord evicted him. He moved, but the cats kept coming and outgrowing the human space. Eventually, Grant spent his own retirement money (amounting, it is said, to $100,000) purchasing lots of land on a Florida tree farm. Now, he lives there, on Caboodle Ranch (think ‘Kit ‘n’ Caboodle’), in a trailer, in thirty acres, with his five hundred cats, brought to him by the public, where, he explains, ‘cats aren’t treated like animals’.
Cats should be able to roam free, and at Caboodle Ranch, that’s what they do. We are in the middle of 100 acres of wildlife. The cats follow me through the nature trails that I put in and maintain, they climb in tree forts that I’ve built and hide in underground dens I’ve dug for them.
All cats have been spayed or neutered, all shots are kept up to date and I keep regular visits to the vet for each of them. I travel the 250 miles round-trip many times a week to work and back again to keep a safe haven for them to live. Every one of my expenses have come out of my own pocket and I do with very little so I can give them a happy life, but it isn’t always easy.
Grant’s vet bills exceed $2,000 a month and the food he puts out every day, calling, ‘Babies, babies, come on, babies’ (there are videos on the website), costs $800 a week. Altogether the ranch costs $6,000 a month to run and survives on donations, now that his own funds have run out. People can visit the ranch, though not until after 2 p.m. each day. Before that he likes to do his rounds alone, feeding and checking on the cats. They come running to him as he nears, a trickle that grows larger as they come from all directions, and then follow him, a festival of feline Lilliputians trailing a lanky elderly gent with a grand drooping moustache that dates back to the 1970s. He calls to and welcomes the oncoming, gathering herd of animals who stream towards him, and treads warily as the cats weave invisible threads around his ankles, mewing greetings and for all one knows telling him the latest news. Grant is no Heidi Erickson; he is realistic about his situation, poignantly but practically so. In his January blog he worries that he hasn’t got enough to keep the ranch going past April. He makes plans:
I need to sell off one of my 5 acre parcels, up the back of the ranch. That property isn’t needed at this point. And I’m considering selling my PT Cruiser, which was to become the Cat Taxi; hopefully I can get what I bought it for. The land line to the office will be turned off to save money as well. You can call my cell phone (which will be working again this weekend!), just be persistent – you will reach me.
And he is aware of the questions people might ask, the anxiety people might feel. In the FAQ, he imagines or reiterates the question: Isn’t what you’re doing considered hoarding? He explains calmly that ‘Caboodle Ranch has the seal of approval from the Tallahassee Humane Society and Tallahassee/Madison County Animal Control. Representatives from both have been to the Ranch and both have liked what they’ve found. We’re happy to say that the answer is no, Caboodle Ranch is not in violation of hoarding.’ It comes as a relief to find this FAQ.
The videos are delightful. He is a happy man, the cats are happy cats, the ranch is funny and silly, decked out like a town with miniature courthouses, cottages and churches along the pathways. Nevertheless, there is something about the seething carpet of cats running around him which sets off the beginnings of that feeling of distaste. The fact that they are outside and that there is plenty of room is reassuring, but you wonder what will happen when this elderly man can no longer cope with his daily round of feeding and caring and the trips to the vet. The FAQs attempt to reassure about this, too. There is a plan for trained people to take over the ranch, apparently. Craig Grant isn’t mad, that is, no madder than any cat lover, and he takes care to soothe our nerves about the too-much love of too many nonhuman others. The son goes and five hundred cats take his place. He copes. The authorities say it’s OK. And we are thankful that it’s none of our business and that he hasn’t caused us to have to watch animal services clearing up the mess that human love can make.
Loving cats isn’t only a pastime of the lonely or old. One of the strangest pages on the Internet is the official site of Charles Mingus, the great, the very great, jazz bass player. He was cooler than a human could possibly be, an exemplary musician and composer, and I played his records (Mingus Ah Um, Tijuana Moods, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus), along with those of Miles Davis, incessantly in my teens. On the webpage called In His Own Words, among articles written by him such as ‘What is a Jazz Composer?’ and ‘Open Letter to Miles Davis’, is a non-musical legacy left for the world by my musical hero: ‘The Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program’. It is a solemnly written step-by-step description which ends, if you follow the programme correctly, with your cat going to the bathroom and sitting on the loo, instead of using a litter tray. If you’re lucky, it will also flush the lavatory when it has finished. Mingus’s instructions end:
It took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, Nightlife. Most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. Do it very slowly and don’t confuse him. And, remember, once the box is on the toilet, leave it a week or even two. The main thing to remember is not to rush or confuse him.
Good luck. Charles Mingus
This, if you have a cat, and no way of letting it come and go outside easily, is doubtless a real addition to goodness in the world. But it points up an overwhelming devotion to this one particular partly domesticated mammal that is almost an integral part of the World Wide Web. Cats seem to be particularly adored by Internet users. In the Internet’s short life, cat lovers have come up with an entire language and world in which cats are the masters of the universe and we, essentially, their handmaidens and enablers.*
Lolcat is close enough to a language, with grammar, spelling and syntax, that it is studied by academics. It is based on misspelling, typos, abbreviations and the sheer stupidity to be found all over the Internet, but it is put into the mouths of cats as captions to photographs of them taken by their owners. There is a Wiki where the Bible has been communally translated into the language of lolcat. Ceiling Cat is God, and Basement Cat is Satan. To get the full flavour of lolcat, I offer you Genesis 1 in its entirety:
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. 2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz. 3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. 4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. 5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1 6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling. 7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen. 8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day. 9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet. 10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good. 11 An Ceiling Cat sayed, DO WANT grass! so tehr wuz seedz An stufs, An fruitzors An vegbatels. An a Corm. It happen. 12 An Ceiling Cat sawed that weedz ish good, so, letz there be weedz. 13 An so teh threeth day jazzhands. 14 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has lightz in the skiez for splittin day An no day. 15 It happen, lights everwear, like christmass, srsly. 16 An Ceiling Cat doeth two grate lightz, teh most big for day, teh other for no day. 17 An Ceiling Cat screw tehm on skiez, with big nails An stuff, to lite teh Urfs. 18 An tehy rulez day An night. Ceiling Cat sawed. Iz good. 19 An so teh furth day w00t. 20 An Ceiling Cat sayed, waterz bring me phishes, An burds, so kittehs can eat dem. But Ceiling Cat no eated dem. 21 An Ceiling Cat maed big fishies An see monstrs, which wuz like big cows, except they no mood, An other stuffs dat mooves, An Ceiling Cat sawed iz good. 22 An Ceiling Cat sed O hai, make bebehs kthx. An dont worry i wont watch u secksy, i not that kynd uf kitteh. 23 An so teh … fith day. Ceiling Cat taek a wile 2 cawnt. 24 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has MOAR living stuff, mooes, An creepie tings, An otehr aminals. It happen so tehre. 25 An Ceiling Cat doed moar living stuff, mooes, An creepies, An otehr animuls, An did not eated tehm. 26 An Ceiling Cat sayed, letz us do peeps like uz, becuz we ish teh qte, An let min p0wnz0r becuz tehy has can openers. 27 So Ceiling Cat createded teh peeps taht waz like him, can has can openers he maed tehm, min An womin wuz maeded, but he did not eated tehm. 28 An Ceiling Cat sed them O hai maek bebehs kthx, An p0wn teh waterz, no waterz An teh firmmint, An evry stufs. 29 An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, the Urfs, I has it, An I has not eated it. 30 For evry createded stufs tehre are the fuudz, to the burdies, teh creepiez, An teh mooes, so tehre. It happen. Iz good. 31 An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthxbai.3
Icanhascheezburger.com has thousands of photographs of cats, cute or weird with deliberately misspelled, syntax-muddled, garbled messages appended – illiterate and childish, but always with a sense of them being or revealing that they have been all along, in control, or at least are preparing to take over.
Millions of people find this funny and satisfying, and have enough of an imaginative relationship with their cats to ‘get’ lolcats. Look at the icanhascheezburger site for a while and it’s clear that the cats are perceived to have a mysterious life of their own, quite aside from what their owners believe their lives to be. This is one answer to Derrida. There are several million hits on the site every day. It is a mass understanding of the jokes that cat lovers make about their beloved animals: ‘Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later.’ Everyone, it turns out, is a little worried by the way their cat looks at them when they’re standing naked in the bathroom. What, you know, are they up to?
The lolcat phenomenon is not mad or dangerous (though it can be time-sucking), but perhaps it’s a jocular version of the compelling mystery of animals, and of taking animal love too far, at least a recognition that it would not be hard to do so. Lolcats don’t frighten us, not the thousands of pages of them on the web, because we are really remaking them in our own image. They threaten to take over, but only because we allow them to as their devoted owners. We give them ambitions that are our own ambitions of world domination and control. So, after all, we still haven’t answered Derrida’s question. Or rather, haven’t really discovered the question that Derrida’s cat might be asking him – other than, Can I leave the room? Cats remain enigmatic and other, and their owners give them voice – wittily and desperately.
There is another kind of loving animals too much. But that’s not exactly what we mean when we carelessly use the word love, either. Classically, it was the gods, Zeus in particular, who desired human women and came to them in the form of animals – a swan, a bull – to impregnate them. This is a grand and troubling idea; paintings and poetry deal with and depict the cross-species (animal/human, god/mortal) sexual moment:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.4
Even the God of the monotheistic Christians came to a human woman as the Holy Spirit, later described by St Matthew as a dove, which also comes to Jesus at his baptism:
Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
There’s nothing about desire here, as there is with the ever-desiring Zeus, but in both cases, the deities embody themselves as animals rather than humans when they want to take or procreate.
However, the idea of regular humans desiring animals has never been grand. On the contrary, it is either justified as necessary to humanise the non-human (Beauty and the Beast, The Frog Prince), or it is unmentionable and then becomes the subject of jokes by the urbane about the unsophisticated. Sometimes it is used to tell ourselves about our own emotional absurdity and lack of control. Although she is magicked into it, Titania’s love for Bottom the Weaver, who has taken on the form of a donkey, is low humour and high hilarity about the arbitrary nature of human desire. Before the spell is taken away, the Queen of the Fairies trills to her beloved ass-headed yokel (cross-species, cross-class):
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
This is love being blind. But there are those who use, abuse and even love (in what we might term the correct use of the word ‘love’) animals, with eyes wide open. Certainly, it was a real enough phenomenon for the rules laid down for proper living in Leviticus to include bestiality in the prohibitions:
Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion
Confusion between one thing and another, of course, is the point of many rules in Leviticus, and what could be more confused than humans and animals – ask Derrida, ask Bunty? Just to nail the seriousness of the offence, the punishment is spelled out:
And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death and ye shall slay the beast.
And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto, thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast; they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them.
How to live rightly and wrongly is basic to any theology, and the writer of Leviticus knew his congregation – nomadic, sheep- and goat-herding people – and was realistic about them, just as those who joke about the prevalence of bestiality in out-of-the-way rural communities express a similar reality – though from a different frame of mind.
In his book, Dearest Pet – On Bestiality, Midas Dekkers explains that Kinsey – that great expresser of reality to 1950s suburban America – received answers to his questionnaires suggesting that 8 per cent of men and 3.5 per cent of women had had a sexual encounter with an animal, while the figure for men living in the countryside who had done so rose to 50 per cent. It can be a practical solution where other more usual objects of love are scarce, or servicing a need without breaking the stronger social rules of society that values virginity in young women, or risking the consequences of unwanted pregnancy. It can be unimaginably violent and abusive, where men penetrate live chickens and then decapitate them at the moment of the man’s climax to cause muscular death spasms that give extra pleasure. Humans using animals for sexual purposes has always to be a disregarding of the other, since an animal cannot give knowing consent to a sex act with our species. Dekkers discusses women who train dogs to provide cunnilingus, and men finding the back end of cows sinuous and desirable. There are those who believe their chosen animal gets pleasure, even loves them, but until an animal is able to convey unequivocal consent, sex between a human and an animal must, like sex between a human and another human who has not consented, be rape. There is common ground between the imperialist power-demonstration of the human rape of humans and the act of bestiality. Both assume that the Other (human or animal) is either beneath consideration, or, where there is a delusion of consent or even seduction, that the rapist believes that he (or she) is able to think for or with their victim, and that they can know what the assaulted other really wants. The lack of (our) language in animals is taken, like silence is in law, for consent. But it’s impossible, actually, to ask animals the question.